6.1 A Toolkit Approach

Using a toolkit for SOAP programming is almost a requirement. The specification itself is very complex, and the XML documents are equally complex. While there is nothing preventing an application developer from coding the functionality directly, there is no reason to with the availability of toolkits for Perl.

A client is concerned with (not always in this order):

• Establishing a communication channel to the server(s)

• Constructing a valid request with the desired data

• Sending the request to the server correctly

• Retrieving and decoding the server response

The goal of a good toolkit is to abstract as much of the encoding and transport issues as possible. There are two toolkits for Perl available from CPAN. Both are discussed here, but the focus will quickly shift to the SOAP::Lite module, which is more actively maintained .